Reiverr

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 771 words

Reiverr is a front-end, not a media server, and every complaint I have seen about it comes from someone who missed that. It assumes a running Jellyfin, a running Radarr, and a running Sonarr, and it puts a single browse-request-watch screen over the three so a household stops juggling four bookmarks. If those three services already exist and are reachable, it is a 512 MB Docker container and 10 minutes of pasting API keys. If they do not, it is nothing at all.

The stack it assumes

The *arr stack explainer covers what Radarr and Sonarr do; the short version is that they track which films and series you want and hand the downloads to a client. Jellyfin then serves the resulting files. Reiverr adds a single web app, built in TypeScript with a SvelteKit front-end and a NestJS back-end, that queries TMDB for discovery, checks your Jellyfin library for what is already available, and lets you add missing titles directly to Radarr or Sonarr from the same detail page. Playback happens in Reiverr's own player, streaming from Jellyfin, so the user never visits the Jellyfin UI at all.

The result looks and behaves like a streaming service: hero banners, "popular this week" rows, a detail page with a Watch button if you have it and a Request button if you do not. That is the entire pitch, and it is a good one for a family that finds the *arr apps intimidating.

Deploying it is one container and three API keys

services:
  reiverr:
    image: ghcr.io/aleksilassila/reiverr:latest
    ports:
      - "9494:9494"
    volumes:
      - ./reiverr-config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Open port 9494, create the first admin account, then enter the URL and API key for each of Jellyfin, Radarr, and Sonarr in the settings page. Use container names or internal IPs that Reiverr can actually reach from inside its own network; the most common setup failure is entering localhost for a service that lives in another container. Sonarr and Radarr each need a default quality profile and root folder chosen in Reiverr so that a request can be added without prompting.

Users are per-Reiverr accounts that map onto Jellyfin users for playback and library state, so each member of the household gets their own continue-watching row. There is no LDAP or OIDC yet.

Jellyseerr is the incumbent, and the split is playback

Jellyseerr is the established way to give people a request page for a Jellyfin library, with 4 years of releases, approval workflows, per-user quotas, notifications to Discord and Telegram, and an admin view of what is pending. Reiverr does requests too, but with much thinner controls: no approval queue, no quotas, no notification integrations worth mentioning at last check. What Jellyseerr does not do is play anything; it hands you off to Jellyfin.

So the decision is simple. If you want a request system with governance, run Jellyseerr and keep Jellyfin's own client for watching. If you want one screen that both requests and plays, and you trust everyone with an account to add whatever they like, Reiverr is the only project doing that. Some people run both, with Jellyseerr for the admin and Reiverr as the family's front door.

Young, opinionated, and still moving

The project started in 2023, has 2,341 stars and an MIT license, and went through a full rewrite that changed the architecture and reset some features. That is the main risk: a single maintainer, a fast-moving codebase, and a settings format that has already changed once. Pin the image tag rather than tracking latest if you would rather update on your own schedule. The player is also the weak spot compared with Jellyfin's own web client. It relies on the server transcoding for anything the browser cannot direct-play, and subtitle handling is more basic than Jellyfin's.

Plex users should note that the Plex integration from the early versions was dropped in the rewrite; this is a Jellyfin project now.

What I'd do

Run Reiverr only if all three upstream services are already stable and you have at least two people in the house who would rather never see a Radarr screen. Pin the tag, put it behind the same reverse proxy as Jellyfin, and keep Jellyseerr installed alongside it if you want any say over what gets requested. For a single-user setup, skip it: Jellyfin's client plus Jellyseerr covers the same ground with more maturity and one fewer container to babysit.